“There were a few little things that looked like a little bit of algae or calcification that may have come from something that tried to attach there,” he says. He was struck by the absence of marine life. To verify that the part could indeed have floated its way naturally to the beach, he had put it in the ocean and photographed it floating “just absolutely flat as a pancake” at the surface. When he first held the piece, he told me, his immediate reaction was that it was so light and thin, that it was probably from some light aircraft or small plane - “but maybe it’s from MH370.” Only when back on dry land and able to consult with other MH370 researchers did he realize that the lettering looks identical to the “ NO STEP” warnings on the wings of 777s, and the alphanumerical code on the head of a rivet indicates that it’s a fastener used in the aerospace industry. He told me that he and the Australian consul had met earlier that day with the head of civil aviation in Mozambique, who promised that he would do the proper paperwork and then turn the piece over to the Australian Transportation Safety Board, who are overseeing the search for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean. “I did not expect that this would all hit this early and so fast,” he said. He sounded tired but elated, having just gotten off a live interview on Richard Quest’s show on CNN. On Wednesday afternoon, I managed to reach Gibson by phone in Maputo. And, of course, no other 777 has been lost in the Indian Ocean except for MH370. According to these accounts, experts believe that the piece could be part of the composite skin from the horizontal stabilizer - that is, one of the miniature “wings” on either side of the tail - of a 777. Wednesday morning, news articles about the discovery appeared on CNN, the BBC, NBC, and elsewhere. On Tuesday, Gibson bundled up the piece in cardboard and flew with it to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, to turn it over to the authorities. Then the responsible international investigators can come to inspect.” Related StoriesĪnother Part of the Missing MH370 Plane May Have Washed Ashore The procedure with other possible debris discoveries in La Réunion, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia has been to report it to local authorities first. Gibson asked me to keep his find a secret, explaining, “It is too large and metallic to be easily taken out of the country, and needs to have its provenance documented. In a video that Gibson posted to a closed-access Facebook page, the fragment looks quite light and insubstantial, easy enough for one man to pick up and wave around - unlike the flaperon found on Réunion, which required several people to lift. At the bottom of the intact edge there is a very thin (1 to 2 mm thick) strip of dried rubber remaining that runs about 30 mm along the edge before it was broken off. The distance from the edge of the hole with the pin to the intact edge is about 8 mm. The bolt holes are spaced about 30 mm apart from center to center of hole. The remaining highlock pin has a 10 mm diameter head. It appears to be from an aircraft wing … The piece is torn and broken into a triangular shape, 94 cm long at the base and 60 cm high. The debris appears to be made of a fiberglass composite and has aluminum honeycomb inside. The next morning, Gibson emailed me a description of the object: They arrived at around 7 a.m., and after about 20 minutes on the flat, low stretch of sand the boat captain spotted something unusual and handed it to Gibson. The captain chose a sandbar called Paluma, a half-dozen miles from the coastal town of Vilankulos. On February 27, he says, he hired a boat captain to take him someplace where flotsam from the ocean tended to wash up. Last week, Gibson found himself in Mozambique searching for debris on local beaches. “I am just looking for evidence that may have been prematurely dismissed.” “I do not have a theory,” he emailed me last September. He is simply motivated by the desire to know what happened to the airliner. He has no professional background in aircraft-accident investigation or journalism, and no professional accreditation. He’s been to the Maldives to talk to villagers who say they saw a large plane fly low overhead the day after the disappearance visited Réunion Island to interview the local who found the flaperon from MH370 and met with Australian deputy prime minister Warren Truss to discuss the ongoing seabed search. Blaine Alan Gibson, center, with Mozambicans Tony Manna, left, and Suleman “Junior “ Valy, right.īlaine Alan Gibson, a 58-year-old lawyer who lives in Seattle, Washington, has spent much of the past year traveling around the Indian Ocean region trying to solve the mystery of what happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.
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